Employer brand, employee brand engagement, stakeholder communication

I have to confess that I’ve recently changed my thinking about the intersection of brand and engagement. Not having been educated or experience in the world of brand, I wasn’t party to the thinking behind the value of brand and it’s place in the success of organisations. Over the last 5 years as businesses search for a post-crash formula for success, I think taxonomy has got in the way of simplicity and what it all really means. Employee engagement has
so many definitions
and like many, I couldn’t articulate employer brand well enough to make the argument for its place either. Even the term internal communications is being debated – should we call it employee communications now?

As we strive to make work better for people, does it really mattter who ‘owns’ the relationship with employees or who is responsible for engagement. There is one commonality for every employee and I believe that’s brand. And

PALM SPRINGS, CA – I had the real privilege to attend EY’s Strategic Growth Forum (SGF) in Palm Springs last week. An amazing event focusing on mid-cap growth businesses and entrepreneurial startups from across the Americas.

The event itself was flawlessly executed. Quality and attention to detail at a level I have never before experienced in corporate events and hospitality – so kudos to the EY team that made the event happen.

In terms of takeaways, it was a real honor to be relatively up close and personal with some inspirational and highly effective leaders – (I didn’t manage to attend them all as I was working after all) but managed to squeeze in some really amazing talks – Jeffery Immelt from GE, David Rubenstein CEO of the Carlyle Group (maybe the best speaker I have ever seen on the topic of business), Kathy Ireland, Dr Kjell Nordstrom from Stockholm School of Economics, Jeffrey Sprecher of ICE who just bought the NYSE, Hamdi Ulukaya of Chobani, and Andre Agassi.

What did I take away? Here are my key thoughts:

Purpose. It is essential in life and as a business. In my world, this is good news since BrandPie helps companies find their purpose and bring it to life internally and externally.

People. Every speaker made no bones about it: get the best people, (almost) at any cost, so long as they fit your culture.

Failure. It is good. Do it. Do it fast. Learn from it and move forward.

Luck. All modestly, but probably accurately, credited luck as a powerful factor in any success.

Learning. Every single one was passionate about constantly learning and its importance.

Of course, there were many more points made – I particularly related to Jeff Immelt’s passion for focus on outcomes as well as a culture of “zero optionality” at GE; and Kjell Nordstrom’s point that technology has abolished the need for “the centre” so that relationships, organisations and communities can operate “periphery to periphery.”

Dan Gray has waxed lyrical about Jack Welch and others in the business strategy firmament turning their backs on the previous century’s predominant focus on “pursuit of shareholder value” as the core driver of successful business.

Interesting to see that the first (apparent) argument for the pursuit of shareholder value came from none other than the near-canonised Milton Friedman who said it in 1970. (Forbes article here is an entertaining read on “Who’s money is it anyway?).

It’s interesting to see what the relentless focus on quarter by quarter shareholder returns has done to the long-term performance of capital:

A few years ago, Kevin Keohane and I had the heretical notion that the answer to getting c-suite types to open their minds to the business value of brand and business communications was to merrily swim in the opposite direction to most of our brethren.

Where they tried to persuade people with pseudo-academic tomes full of detailed case studies and examples, we decided to take the path less travelled – short, unapologetically opinionated and no-holds barred synopses of critical insights and what to do about them.

So the 55-Minute Guide series was born, and a long-overdue scan of the books’ pages on Amazon would seem to suggest we were bang on.

If there’s a golden rule of branding, it’s to be authentic – to ensure that the gap between what you promise and what you deliver is as small…

As an ex-Publicis ( well, and ex-WPP before that) employee I felt compelled to write a bit about this topic.

First, size notwithstanding it makes sense. Speaking very generally and from a less than fully informed position … Publicis feel strong in advertising and PR, and made numerous Digital acquisitions but are beyond weak on credible brand strategy/branding agencies. Omnicom is strong in brand , analytics and advertising in particular. So that makes sense.

Third, let’s not forget the “rule of three and four” when it comes to consolidation in any sector. The classic BCG article is here and makes a strong case for the right balance of market share among big sector players. In summary (from the BCG site):

A stable competitive market never has more than three significant competitors, the largest of which has no more than four times the market share of the smallest.

The conditions which create this rule are:

A ratio of 2 to 1 in market share between any two competitors seems to be the equilibrium point at which it is neither practical nor advantageous for either competitor to increase or decrease share. This is an empirical observation.

Any competitor with less than one quarter the share of the largest competitor cannot be an effective competitor. This too is empirical but is predictable from experience curve relationships.

Characteristically, this should eventually lead to a market share ranking of each competitor one half that of the next larger competitor with the smallest no less than one quarter the largest. Mathematically, it is impossible to meet both conditions with more than three competitors.

The Rule of Three and Four is a hypothesis. It is not subject to rigorous proof. It does seem to match well observable facts in fields as diverse as steam turbines, automobiles, baby food, soft drinks and airplanes. If even approximately true, the implications are important.

The underlying logic is straightforward. Cost is a function of market share as a result of the experience curve effect.

I’ve been working with a business partner developing a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook as a bit of a learning/side project/commercial enterprise and an idea arose for a second app idea – completely unrelated to the plug-in.

Mobility and talent sourcing/utilisation are huge issues for organisations so we did a bit of digging around as part of preliminary research – what is out there and what kind of platform would work best. Could make a good app – internally – for organisations, particularly in professional services.

So we considered Google search; LinkedIn search and Advanced People Search; SharePoint; Facebook; and an online dating site – the former for obvious reasons, the latter based on the buzz their algorithms generated in the tech and online psychology arenas.

The clear winner in terms of speed and accuracy was LinkedIn – likely its combination of dense user-generated data, user-generated natural language search courtesy of the “endorsement” feature; and its search engine.

The other methods performed OK – Facebook performed poorly as expected, for the obvious reason of generally smaller sets of people and its not being a professional network. Google was obviously slightly out of scope but did deliver third party resources as well as plenty of links to LinkedIn (the key being add “Linkedin” to the search terminology). SharePoint was hard to judge due to access issues, but we assumed would perform somewhat less well than LinkedIn, within and organisation, due to challenges in getting categories and tags correct and getting users to complete profiles etc.

The surprise was the online dating site, which we thought would be a match made in heaven (pardon the pun). There was a lot of buzz several years back about the powerful algorithms this multi-million dollar industry was using. The app idea had been based on using that kind of back end as a basis but make the focus finding people and skills rather than ‘dates’. A brilliant idea: just repurpose it! But based on the performance (and we think we found out why – for reasons like this) it’s amazing the species can procreate, let alone use the tool for skill seeking. [It was an interesting experience … but that’s a story for a different day.]

Still – there are learnings to be had that apply to all social media. In passing, Shel Holtz recently put up a brilliant blog posting about conventional wisdom being anything but when it comes to social media and many of these things rang true in this very unscientific study.

The long and short of it is that, blindingly obvious as it might sound, if you want to find a specific set of skills within a defined universe and even geography – regardless of the platform you are using – you can’t rely on one way to find them. The devil is in the user profiles – a combination of tags, categories but most importantly user-generated, natural-language data.